Enlighten

What is Enlighten?

Global illumination computes the way that light is bounced from, or absorbed by, materials in a scene. By adding the effect of bounced light, artists are able to light any scene with just a small number of light sources, all while bringing unrivalled subtlety and harmony to the application’s graphics.

Enlighten calculates the effect of global illumination in real-time. Lights, materials and objects can be moved and updated at runtime with the global illumination updating in milliseconds. This runtime feature is available both in-game and in-editor and scales across all of today’s gaming and consumer devices.

The technology is designed to interact smoothly with the developer’s graphics pipeline and computes industry-standard outputs: directional lightmaps, spherical harmonic probes and reflection captures. These are combined with state-of-the-art relighting models during shading to light any world to high quality.

Features

Enhanced Workflow

Enlighten computes indirect lighting at runtime both in the game and in the editor. The instant editor feedback enables artists to light a scene in seconds and removes the need for a lengthy bake after each iteration.

Enlighten Auto UVs provide a more efficient alternative to the traditional method of obtaining light-map UVs.

Revolutionise Gameplay

Enlighten gives game designers the ability to dynamically update light and materials at runtime.

This makes new gameplay elements possible including player-controlled lighting and drastic changes in level geometry through destruction, all while maintaining consistent and high quality lighting.

Your Look

Enlighten provides a vast range of controls and options that allow you to precisely create the envisioned look of a level.

From the hyper-realism to the cartoon look, you will always be able to realise your creative vision.

Dynamic Worlds

Enlighten supports the indirect lighting of an entire spectrum of worlds, from large, outdoor scenes to small, enclosed environments. It features advanced level of detail mechanisms for terrain, lightmaps and probes which guarantee rapid, high quality radiosity updates at runtime.

This ensures that dynamic effects, such as time of day, are possible even for massive worlds.

Real-time Reflections

Enlighten provides advanced, screen-space independent dynamic reflections with a consistent response across different materials and lighting conditions – all within an affordable performance budget.

This creates a more accurate and realistic representation of a scene’s reflections which allows for unique capabilities in scene design and enhanced gameplay experiences.

Paint with Light

Enlighten allows new and intuitive ways of working with light and colour, including the ability to make any surface into a dynamic area light by modelling it as an emissive surface, dramatically expanding an artist’s toolbox.

Whatever the changes made, emissive surfaces will have almost zero performance cost.

Forge Lighting Editor

Enlighten ships with Forge, a lighting editor and pipeline tool with a real-time global illumination preview, which enables you to maximise visual quality by providing instant feedback on your changes.

Forge connects to Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya, enabling you to import your scene into Forge with a single click. Lighting conditions and textures can be experimented on and finalised before exporting to the game engine.

Any Game, Any Engine

Enlighten is available as a stand-alone SDK or integrated into Unreal Engine 3 and 4. The support team has extensive experience in guiding new teams through the integration process and comprehensive documentation is provided.

It is the real-time global illumination within behind Unity 5.

Advanced Cross-Platform Technology

Enlighten is a lightweight technology that scales between mobile, console, desktop and virtual reality (VR) platforms, guaranteeing a consistent look across all devices.

Beyond the Game

Enlighten is the world’s most advanced dynamic lighting technology, delivering real-time global illumination across mobile, desktop and virtual reality (VR) platforms. Enlighten has near universal applications that span far beyond gaming. It is ideal for any enterprise with real-time dynamic lighting requirements including:

Film Pre-visualisation

Virtual Studios/Broadcasting

Architecture Visualisation

Creative Agencies

Educational and Training Simulation

Other VR/AR Applications

Why is global illumination important?

Global illumination accurately simulates the indirect light that bounces between the objects in your scene. This is the biggest contributor to the photo-realistic quality graphics today’s customers expect. It adds a degree of realism to your scenes and enhances the quality of lighting – just place a few light sources and realistic fill lighting is simulated automatically.

Enhanced Workflow

Enlighten delivers real-time dynamic global illumination in your scene editor. This instant feedback on your changes enables you to light a scene in seconds, removing the need for a lengthy bake after each iteration.

Friction-Free Rendering

Enlighten is optimised to extract maximum performance from hardware through intelligent resource allocation. The runtime calculations can be computed on the CPU asynchronously to the main rendering on the GPU. This empowers developers to increase the complexity of lighting effects and achieve even higher performance. With this advanced high frame rate support, Enlighten enables seamless and immersive virtual/augmented reality experiences possible.